• The LA Times writing on D&D.
• An interview from Wizards with Zak S. Zak writes a really cool blog called Playing D&D With Porn Stars which is mostly general musings on his style of D&D and playing with a group who aren’t traditional gamers. Seriously – it’s a really interesting read from a rally interesting guy.
• E6 – it’s a style of D&D that involves limiting levels to level 6 and not progressing further. Low level play for the win! There’s rules for 3/3.5 and rules for 4e. My favourite levels of D&D are a bit beyond this – say 8 till 12 – but I like the basic idea a lot.
• A Spanish Civil War card game! Two of my favourite obsessions in one! The Spanish Civil War is a really underutilised part of history for gaming I think – one day I’ll write my Call of Cthulhu Spanish Civil War game.

Finally here’s a TED talk from game designer Jane McGonigal about how if we increase our weekly online gaming hours to 21 billion we can save the world. It’s complete bullshit, but it’s interesting bullshit!

Today I found (via Very Short List)  this cool flickr set of 1920′s passport photos. They’re of famous people but they’re largely not recognisable (and not all of them are still famous). Perfect for a Pulp game or some 20′s Call of Cthulhu.

Sorry for last week’s lack of links and apologies in advance for the lack of links next week!

• Mark Charan Newton thinks sci-fi books are dying. I tend to agree.
• Why fandom owes even more to H.P. Lovecraft than we realised.
• A man has ‘beaten’ WoW. Sort of (via Boing Boing)
• Dollhouse battles were about sex. So says Whedon – Fox will never tell.
• Real life vampire killing kits!
• Using Microsoft’s Surface to play D&D – more footage.

• Charles Stross writes on the issues to do with spaceships.
• Lev Grossman chooses his top 5 fantasy books of all time! (via i09.com)
• Something Awful dissects the art of Traveller.
• Paizo are having another of their RPG Superstar design competitions.

I think the internet is playing Dragon Age too…

• Holy crap – Planescape: Torment is getting a re-release! Best CRPG EVER. This will work properly on Vista and Windows 7 apparently so it will work nicely for the new PC… (thanks to the Wertzone – no idea how I missed this on my RPS feed)
• Boing Boing has a piece on using Google Wave as a chat channel for RPGs. I guess, but it won’t replace the table top for me.
• Boardgame News has a great article running down card games and boardgames that have been released using the whole Cthulhu/Lovecraft mythos – great, good, average and bad. I really want to play some Arkham Horror.
• And finally, here’s a report about the Essen Game Fair by a guy from local shop Paradigm Infinitum.

• Apparently Dollhouse has been put on a brief hiatus due to the upcoming sweeps week. Hopefully the fact that its DVR ratings have been huge means that it will finish up the season – at least.
• An Iain M. Banks story has been picked up to be made into a film! Bank’s short story ‘A gift from the Culture’ from the collection The State of The Art is apparently going to be made into a film. More here and here (tip from A Dribble of Ink). No word on timing or anything else. I’ve read the story but can’t remember a thing about it and I think the book is on my parents shelf half a world away. Anyone else remember much?

• The RZA talks about being a geek – comics, technology and letting his kids play videogames for 4 hours a day.
• The webcomic XKCD gets animated.

In other nerdy news, I now have an HD TV and boy does my 360 look good!